Fred Clark writes about the persecution complex behind the NOM ads…
We’ve seen how this plays out on the national scene two, three times a month. Some pious dignitary remarks that homosexuality is just like pedophilia or bestiality — a statement regarded within the hegemony of the sect as wholly innocent and inoffensive. Someone outside the sect will reply, accurately, that this is an offensive lie, a vicious slander. That response will be perceived, within the sect, as "religious persecution." The response — any response other than "thank you, sir, may I have another?" — implicitly rejects the legitimacy of the hegemony and rebels against the privilege enjoyed by the sect. (A big part of that privilege, it turns out, is the expectation that one can say offensive things without others taking or expressing offense. This has become far more important as a hallmark of American evangelicalism than, say, Sabbath-keeping.)
I’d say this isn’t just a religious right phenomena. You see culture warriors on the right holding the same two mutually contradictory positions that Fred points out in certain American evangelical circles. On the one hand, we represent the Great American Heartland…the Common Folk…The Moral Majority…The Silent Majority… And so on… But on the other, we are oppressed. Our values and our way of life are in danger of becoming extinct.
Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been hearing a version of this self contradicting complaint for decades now. On the one hand, gay people are a teeny-tiny minuscule minority, whose claims of oppression don’t even merit a laugh, let alone any serious thought. On the other, we are a vast and powerful conspiracy that will soon extinguish any trace of American values. On the one hand we are contemptible, weak, easily frightened swishing faggots. On the other hand we are dangerous militants. Huh?
The thought police are always out to get them. Political Correctness is always taking away their right to express their deeply held beliefs. Whenever someone is called out for their cheap bar stool prejudices, they complain that they are being silenced. It isn’t that people find their knuckle dragging bigotries disgusting. It’s that a vast liberal socialist communist homosexual conspiracy is out to get them. When Mrs California endorsed cutting off the ring fingers of all the gay citizens of California, and promptly fell out of favor with the Mrs America judges, a great wail arose from the kook pews, clamoring that she was the victim of political correctness, and that people who opposed the gay agenda were being silenced.
PRAGUE (AFP) — A former US Ku Klux Klan chief was arrested Friday in a Prague restaurant while he was on a speaking tour here, Czech police said.
Former Grand Wizard of the Louisiana-founded Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, was arrested on suspicion of promoting movements seeking the suppression of human rights, police spokesman Jan Mikulovsky told local media.
Regardless of how low in the human cesspool Duke is, that charge sent a little chill down my spine. It was pure reflex, most likely born of having spent my entire life swaddled in American culture. But there it was. David Duke is lower then spit in a urinal in my book, but I am much less afraid of anything David Duke might say, then I am of the charge he was arrested under. …suspicion of promoting movements seeking the suppression of human rights… What the hell does that mean? Suspicion of promoting movements…? Seeking the suppression…? What is the fucking criminal act here? It could be anything. Today that might mean talking about suppressing the rights of black people. Tomorrow it might mean arguing against it, thereby suppressing the right of white people to keep black people in their place. It could be anything. Totalitarian states love that kind of thing. It’s the kind of law that can be whatever they want it to be, whenever they want it to be that. And you don’t have to actually Do Anything to break that law. Just talk about doing something. Maybe with one person. Maybe with a whole roomful of people. It doesn’t matter. You open your trap, say the wrong thing, and you’re toast. And you can never be sure what the wrong thing to say is. It’s whatever the state wants it to be. Probably just right then, in order to arrest you and make it all seem legal. Giving police the power to arrest someone for speaking their mind just greases the skids for fascism.
Mrs Proposition 8 California and her fans aren’t being silenced. Critics of same sex marriage aren’t being silenced. Their freedom to dispense horseshit about morality, religion, family values and same sex marriage does not trump other people’s freedom to call their cheapshit prejudices for what they are, and regard them with disgust. If you can’t tell the difference between loosing a crown or loosing a tax break and going to jail then go get yourself arrested in some foreign land for opening your trap at the wrong time in the wrong place and find out.
From Pat Robertson, speaking about the DHS report on right wing extremists:
"It shows somebody down in the bowels of that organization is either a convinced left winger or somebody whose sexual orientation is somewhat in question. But it’s that kind of thing, somebody who doesn’t think that we should have abortion on demand, is labeled a terrorist! It’s outrageous."
And then there’s good old Scott Lively wandering around the globe telling people that genocide is caused by homosexuals When I was a kid, it was the Communists who were secretly behind every hidden plot the lunatic right was babbling on about. Now it’s Teh Gays.
We Can Be Frinds If You Send Me An Ambassador Who Hates Your Guts As Much As I Do
From the Science Blog’s, Dispatches From The Culture War blog, comes news that pope Ratzinger finds President Obama’s ambassadors lacking in some basic quality…
It was reported a couple weeks ago that the Vatican had rejected three possible nominees to be the next ambassador to the Holy See because the people they’d nominated were pro-choice on abortion:
The Vatican has quietly rejected at least three of President Obama’s candidates to serve as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See because they support abortion, and the White House might be running out of time to find an acceptable envoy before Mr. Obama travels to Rome in July, when he hopes to meet Pope Benedict XVI.
Italian journalist Massimo Franco, who broke the story about the White House attempts to find a suitable ambassador to the Vatican, said papal advisers told Mr. Obama’s aides privately that the candidates failed to meet the Vatican’s most basic qualification on the abortion issue.
Okay…so this is about Abortion…right? The pope doesn’t want President Obama slapping him in the face with a pro-choice ambassador…right?
Caroline Kennedy, the Roman Catholic daughter of the assassinated President, has been rejected by the Vatican as the next US ambassador to the Holy See because of her liberal views on abortion, stem-cell research and same-sex marriage, according to Vatican insiders…
Mr Obama was said to have wanted to reward Ms Kennedy for supporting his election. The other rejected nominees reportedly included Douglas Kmiec, professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University and a former legal adviser to Presidents Reagan and George Bush Sr, who urged American Catholics to vote for Mr Obama.
But Kmiec is firmly anti-choice on abortion and always has been. He endorsed Obama despite disagreement over abortion. Which means the only basis for rejecting him is that he supported someone who is pro-choice. And on that basis, Obama would have to pick someone who does not support his presidency in order to satisfy the Vatican.
Kmiec was probably a worse pick then a pro-choice candidate. Kmiec is probably a traitor in Ratzinger’s eyes. It doesn’t matter that he opposes abortion. He supported Obama. Probably because he, like a lot of social conservatives who, after eight years of watching the republican party run itself into the ground, put his country before his personal views on abortion. That is precisely the kind of thing that would have made him absolutely unpalatable to Ratzinger. The first thing you have to abandon in the culture war, is your conscience.
Joanne Wilder has never protested anything in public before. She’s never boxed with City Hall, let alone Washington.
"I’ve been a quiet little person my whole life," she said.
But today in downtown Syracuse, the 60-year-old great-grandmother will lead a Tax Day Tea Party protest against the spending policies of the Obama administration and Congress.
Well good for you Ms Wilder! We Americans should all roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty in the nuts and bolts of making representative government work for us. After all…it Is our government. Of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Common, average, everyday people…like the Heritage Foundation, FOX News, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck…
The protests are being coordinated by a coalition of national conservative groups and promoted by celebrity conservative commentators such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.
But they’re being carried out across the country by new grass-roots leaders like Wilder, who are upset that the government seems to be bailing out everyone but them.
Everyone but you, eh?
After a lifetime of working, paying taxes and raising three children on her own, Wilder is struggling.
She said she retired on disability from M&T Bank three years ago after undergoing knee replacement and back surgeries. She lives on her Social Security and disability benefits. Last year, she petitioned the bankruptcy court for protection from creditors.
She said she did not have to pay federal income taxes last year because her income was too low.
"I don’t want to see this country turn into a welfare, nanny state, where we stand in line for groceries, and we’re in welfare lines, and in socialized medicine lines," Wilder said.
Okay…let me get this straight. You’re living on social security and disability benefits and you want the government to get off the backs of the rich, cut taxes and put an end to entitlement programs. I have a question: who pays your health care costs m’am?
Tool.
I actually know someone in a similar situation. Lives on disability (it’s legit…trust me)…lives in one of the most upscale counties in the nation and gets section 8 housing because he has no source of income…medical and health care costs all paid either by the state or the feds, which yes, he really needs or he’d have died long ago. Oh…and smokes pot like a goddamned chimney. Liberal socialist communist hippy freak? Oh mes non… Loyal Republican. Listens to Rush…watches FOX…just can’t stand what the liberals are doing to this country. Like…oh…putting food in the stomachs of people who can’t work and giving them a roof over their heads and some semblance of human dignity instead of tossing them into the street to beg…which is exactly what would happen if the right had its way.
If it amazes you how so many people whose lives have been made better by American liberalism have turned against it with a snarl you aren’t paying attention. This isn’t about policy. Digby’s right…the issues are fungible. This is about tribe. The folks saying now that the republican party needs to move beyond the culture war if it wants to survive, seem not to have got the point of the last few decades. It was always about the culture war. The social issues aren’t tangential, they’re the bedrock.
Divide the nation, Nixon’s adviser Pat Buchanan told him, and we’ll have the bigger half. Several decades of culture war later, the right has simply led a fairly sizable slice of America into a kind of mental prison more lock tight then anything old Joe Stalin, Mao or Goebbels could have wished for in their wildest dreams. Here’s one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers explaining something I’ve seen with my own eyes in my own family, and among folks who once upon a time were friends of mine…
I celebrated Easter yesterday with my ultra conservative family. I love my family but they have gone so far to the right over the past 8 years that it is difficult to have any sort of discussion with them. I think they are typical of conservatives born in the baby boom. They are scarred by the culture wars and the hatred they have for the left is so strong that it becomes disturbing.
That hatred, let it be said, didn’t start with Reagan. It started with Nixon. These are the folks of my own generation and earlier, who cheered on the hard hats as they bashed the hippies protesting racism, the Vietnam war, and fought for women’s rights and sexual liberty. You need to remember about this crowd that they thought that the twin beds in Lucy and Ricky’s television apartment and the fact that even when Lucy was clearly "with child" nobody was allowed to utter the word "pregnant" on TV was as perfectly appropriate for TV as Fred Flintstone selling cigarettes. Separate But Equal was working just fine until some communist inspired uppity blacks and a bunch of New York Jews started agitating everyone. A woman’s place was in the house cooking dinner for her husband not in the workplace unless she was too ugly to find a man and maybe those women could be secretaries or nurses or waitresses or something. And the more horrifying symbol of social decay, the biggest threat to the sanctity of American family life wasn’t homosexuality or even the Communist Menace, it was males wearing their hair so long it went below the collar.
These people weren’t scarred by the culture wars. They were scarred by the shock, shock of seeing that there were other people in the world who didn’t buy into their racist, sexist, war mongering moral values. Let’s see how well they’ve matured over the years shall we…?
So with this in mind I compiled a few themes from the days discussions that you might find interesting (or horrifying). None of this is ground breaking but it is interesting to see these generalizations about the current conservative movement be personified in ones family.
1. Total insulation from MSM.
Everyone refuses to read the New York Times or Washington Post. Sunday morning while getting ready for Church I put on "Meet the Press" and my father looked on with disgust and changed the channel to Fox News. At dinner I brought up an article in The Economist that was critical of Barack Obama and my uncle said that it was a socialist rag.
2. Distrust of centrists When discussing the future of the Republican party I suggested that we needed to create a bigger tent and avoid social issues that alienated us from younger voters. My GRANDMOTHER responded that we don’t need the back benchers like Christopher Buckley dictating our principles. I think that line was straight from the Mark Levin show.
3. Neoconservative aspirations The most interesting part of the day, was that so much of the discussion focused on the Somali Pirate issue. It was the story of the day, but I didn’t think their was that much to talk about. Surely, not as interesting as talking about Iran, Obama’s budget, the economy etc. However we spent most of the day discussing Obama’s lackluster response to the issue and the weakness he displayed in not acting quicker. My father was incensed that the media kept referring to this as a crime rather then an act of terrorism. His suggestion was to engage in a land war in Somalia…
This tracks pretty well with my own personal experiences, particularly among a few ersatz friends of the Republican Persuasion who kept right on voting for the Shrub even when his party waged one of the most blistering anti-gay election campaigns in American history. They get their news from FOX. As terrified of them as the mainstream news media is, the hard core Still avoids it like it was radioactive, and read only their own tribal publications.
Let me tell you a wee story about that. After I’d been to Memphis to show my support for an Ex-Gay Survivor’s conference, I noticed that Time Magazine did a story that week on gay teens that touched on how this new generation of gay teens is often pressured by their families into ex-gay camps. So I figure I’ll pick up a copy on the drive back home. My drive took me east on I-40 to I-81 and up the backbone of Virginia. Starting around just north of Galax I began to check the drugstores and WalMarts for copies. What I found was that nowhere…and I mean nowhere I stopped, and I must have stopped at dozens of places on the way home…had Any mainstream news magazines for sale on their racks anywhere between Hillsville and Winchester Virginia. Not just no Time, but no Newsweeks, no U.S. News…nada…nothing. Maybe there were some to be found somewhere in that stretch of countryside…but I never found any near the highway until I got to Winchester and pulled into a shopping mall. And the young lady behind the counter gave me a dirty look when she saw what I was buying.
They don’t want to even hear it now. And they don’t have to. They can get their news exclusively from tribal sources. But those sources are anything but grass roots. They imagine they are part of a disenfranchised grass roots majority that was…somehow…denied power that is rightfully theirs by a variety of secret liberal-communist-socialist-homosexual cabals. In fact, they are almost completely owned by right wing billionaires and corporate America.
Case in point…this sad, odd, pathetic tea protest. I’m going to steal this post from Digby (who you should read more often if you don’t already) because it pretty well sums it all up…
Following up on Krugman’s column today and the shrieking and rending of garments by the rightwing, I think it’s it’s probably important to make very clear why the tea-bagger parties are not a grassroots uprising.
The right seems to want us to believe that Fox News is promoting this non-stop as a genuine news event rather than a sponsor — despite the fact that it is an event which hasn’t happened yet. They are, by definition, promoting it.
Local news organizations, which are reporting on the planning for this event either do not realize that they are being spun by a front group pretending to be a grassroots organizing campaign or they don’t care. That front group is called Freedom Works, which presents itself as the conservative answer to Move On.
The MoveOn.org domain name was registered on September 18, 1998 by computer entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, the married cofounders of Berkeley Systems, an entertainment software company known for the flying toaster screen saver and the online game show "You Don’t Know Jack." After selling the company in 1997, Blades and Boyd became concerned about the level of "partisan warfare in Washington" following revelations of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. The MoveOn website was launched initially to oppose the Republican-led effort to impeach Clinton. Initially called "Censure and Move On," it invited visitors to add their names to an online petition stating that "Congress must Immediately Censure President Clinton and Move On to pressing issues facing the country."
At the time of MoveOn’s public launch on September 24, it appeared likely that its petition would be dwarfed by the effort to oust Clinton. A reporter who interviewed Blades on the day after the launch wrote, "A quick search on Yahoo turns up no sites for ‘censure Clinton’ but 20 sites for ‘impeach Clinton,’" adding that Scott Lauf’s impeachclinton.org website had already delivered 60,000 petitions to Congress. Salon.com reported that Arianna Huffington, then a right-wing commentator, had collected 13,303 names on her website, resignation.com, which called on Clinton to resign.
Within a week, however, support for MoveOn had grown. Blades calls herself an "accidental activist. … We put together a one-sentence petition. … We sent it to under a hundred of our friends and family, and within a week we had a hundred thousand people sign the petition. At that point, we thought it was going to be a flash campaign, that we would help everyone connect with leadership in all the ways we could figure out, and then get back to our regular lives. A half a million people ultimately signed and we somehow never got back to our regular lives." MoveOn also recruited 2,000 volunteers to deliver the petitions in person to members of the House of Representatives in 219 districts across America, and directed 30,000 phone calls to district offices.
Here’s how it does business:
MoveOn uses e-mail as its main conduit for communicating with members, sending action alerts at least once a week.
The MoveOn.org web site also uses multi-media, including videos, audio downloads, and images. In addition to communicating via the Internet, MoveOn advertises using traditional print and broadcast media, as well as billboards, bus signs, and bumper stickers, digital versions of which are downloadable from its web site. It also contains an area called the "Action Forum", which functions much like a traditional electronic discussion group. The Action Forums act as a grassroots organization allowing members to propose priorities and strategies.
Through this grassroots methodology, MoveOn collaborates with groups like Meetup.com in organizing street demonstrations, bake sales, house parties, and other opportunities for people to meet personally and act collectively in their own communities.
Some of its core principles are that it is not dependent on foundation money and that it has the ability to use ‘hard money’ – as opposed to grants and tax-deductible contributions – which enables them to be partisan, contribute to political campaigns, and exercise clout in the political process.
Stealing a page from MoveOn.org‘s successful organizing playbook, the leaders of FreedomWorks – a complete merger of the conservative think-tanks Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) and Empower America – hope to conduct massive get out the vote and political education campaigns in the swing states on behalf of President George W. Bush.
The two groups decided to merge because there was "an overlap in issues between the two organization," Shawn Small, the Director of Policy at Empower America, told me in a telephone interview. It was an opportunity to bring together Empower America, which Small characterized as a "grasstops" organization driven by such inside the beltway "superstars" as William Bennett, Vin Weber and Jean Kirkpatrick and CSE’s "grassroots" following.
Will FreedomWorks be successful? Maybe, maybe not, but it is sure to be controversial with longtime Republican Party operative Matt Kibbe at the helm.
If the agenda of FreedomWorks sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The organization’s new website proclaims that it "will expand and broaden the national fight for lower taxes, less government, and more economic freedom."
The leaders of FreedomWorks have all been around the Beltway a number of times. Former House Majority Leader, Texas Republican congressman Dick Armey, C. Boyden Gray, onetime legal counsel to Bush’s father and chairman of the Committee for Justice, an organization about to launch a campaign on behalf of Bush’s right wing judicial appointees, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary and failed vice-presidential candidate, Jack Kemp, will serve as the Co-Chairmen of the organization.
And here’s how it operates:
FreedomWorks claims a membership of over 360,000 and a multi-tentacled legal structure that includes a 501 c(3), a 501 c(4), a 527, a federal PAC, and various state PACs. John Stauber, co-author of Banana Republicans: How The Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State, recently pointed out that that according to internal documents leaked to the Washington Post in January 2000, the bulk of Citizens for a Sound Economy‘s revenues ($15.5 million in 1998) came not from its members, but from contributions of $250,000 and up from large corporations, including Allied Signal, Archer Daniels Midland, DaimlerChrysler, Emerson Electric Company, Enron, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Philip Morris and U.S. West (now Qwest).
And like their progenitors they get millions from the conservative foundations.
Can we all see the difference between Freedom Works and Move On? I knew that you could.
This is what a grass roots movement looks like in conservative America. It’s fake. Just like all the rhetoric about individual freedom, Jesus and family values. Just as The Washington Times could not survive without the infusions of large piles of cash from messianic crackpot Sun Myung Moon, nearly every so-called conservative grass-roots organization could not exist without the largess of corporate America and the stable of right wing billionaires who have been funding the modern conservative movement since the culture wars began in the 60s. Scaife. Ahmanson. Coors. Bradley. Olin. Koch. These people, and the rest of what Eisenhower warned as The Military Industrial Complex, are the crack epidemic poisoning the veins of our country. Without them Americans might actually be getting along with one another reasonably well.
And families like those of Sullivan’s reader might not be living in a 21st century cave, complete with nice TVs and radios that stroke their bar stool conceits, making goddamned sure they see of the world outside only what the ayatollahs of the hard right want them to see, and think Exactly what they want them to think. They are tools, useful idiots, disposable human lives in the war a small but very powerful group of billionaires and corporate interests have been waging for decades now on the American Dream.
What you need to understand: many of them made that of themselves willingly. Joyfully even. Better to live in a cave, then to know that the heathens aren’t monsters after all, but other human beings, happy and content with their own lives just as they are. Anything to not have to know that.
You Can’t Punish A Group Because You Don’t Like Them. Unless I Don’t Like Them Either. Then It’s Okay…
Via Box Turtle Bulletin . Congressman Daniel Lungren complains that congress, in its outrage over bonuses paid to the AIG group that wreaked the company, and oh by the way, the entire world economy, is ignoring the constitution…
Here are the facts: in the stimulus package an amendment was adopted that the Majority put in stating that provisions in the TARP and stimulus bills that limited compensation payments would not apply to ‘any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009.’ It was written specifically to protect the very bonuses that we’re talking about here today. And so now we’re asking how do we undo what we did? And the Majority has brought to us a bill that doesn’t recognize the truth of the Constitution. There is something called a bill of attainder. You can’t punish a group because you don’t like them. You can’t have them treated more onerously than somebody else without a trial.
Now, that’s an unfortunate truth that we have to deal with. How can we deal with it? Yesterday in the Judiciary Committee we had an alternative using bankruptcy principles, but that hasn’t been brought to the floor because it’s arguably constitutional. This is to get headlines to show we are outraged. Let me tell you if we overturn the Constitution to show our outrage, no single American is safe. Because in the future what we will do is say, we have a precedent that when we have an unpopular group, when we have a group that deserves some punishment, we won’t go through the real laws.
Emphasis mine. You can’t punish a group because you don’t like them. If we overturn the Constitution to show our outrage, no single American is safe. Ya think?
In 2004, Michelle, a project manager for a financial services company, and Marc, a draftsman, planned to marry in Philadelphia and get their license in Bucks County – a decision influenced only by the office’s proximity to their home in Hatboro.
They were acting within the law, of course. Couples can buy their marriage licenses in any one of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties and hold their ceremonies in any other.
So how, the Toths now wonder, is their marriage considered legal in Montgomery County, but possibly null and void in Bucks?
The short answer is that the people responsible for issuing marriage licenses – the 67 elected clerks of Orphans Court – are at odds with one another. And the growing ranks of couples using a nontraditional officiant or no officiant at all are getting caught in the conflict.
On one side are clerks, such as those in Bucks and Delaware counties, who want the state marriage-license law tightened. They say the institution of marriage is being sullied, if not undermined, by nontraditional ministers and those who they believe are irreligious, liberal couples seeking to stretch the law.
On the other side are clerks, including those in Philadelphia, Chester, and Montgomery counties, who say the law is clear as long as it is read without bias. Their position has the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union. (This issue does not exist in New Jersey.)
Once, getting the license was not among the wedding minutiae that might drive a sane person to "go bridal." But now the process has become complicated and, some would say, needlessly politicized.
Pennsylvania has two types of marriage license: One that involves some registered official, either a clergyman or a judge. The other is a "self-uniting" license, which is used by couples who wish to take their vows in the presence of witnesses, but without a the clergy or judge. Quakers, being the most frequent self-uniters in the state, this license has come to be known as the "Quaker" license. But note, it isn’t just for Quakers.
The clerks are trying to get rid of the self-uniting license, or severely restrict it to Quakers or other approved religious groups only…they claim to protect the interests of the married couples. They’re telling couples they can’t use the self-uniting license unless they’re Quakers, and warning couples who have already been married using that license to come in with a real minister for a re-marriage.
The ACLU is fighting the clerks over this and so far they’ve won every court case. But the clerks are apparently ignoring the courts and doing what they damn well please.
In an Allegheny County case, a federal judge ruled that self-uniting licenses were not just for Quakers – and that clerks were barred from asking religious questions.
In Philadelphia, Bucks, and Montgomery Counties, judges issued rulings that conflicted with York County’s. Clergy from the Universal Life Church were indeed authorized to solemnize marriages, Bucks County Court Judge C. Theodore Fritsch Jr. ruled in December 2008.
Still, Bucks and Delaware Counties are ignoring the rulings in the ACLU lawsuits.
Reilly says she is protecting engaged couples from future problems. Hugh Donaghue of Delaware County goes a step further. He requires marriage-license applicants to supply Social Security numbers (not required under federal law) because he suspects that some foreign nationals see the marriage license as a valid form of identification.
"Getting a marriage license allows you to establish identification for other purposes and change your status in the country," Donaghue says.
And, speaking of identification, Donaghue’s office requires a photo ID, and he is suspicious when individuals (mostly followers of Islam) don’t have them.
"They say their religious beliefs do not allow them to have their photos taken," Donaghue says.
Like Reilly, Donaghue says his interest is in protecting well-meaning individuals.
Pull the other one. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the welfare of couples in love. They care about this:
They say the institution of marriage is being sullied, if not undermined, by nontraditional ministers and those who they believe are irreligious, liberal couples seeking to stretch the law.
That’s the problem here. That’s the only problem here.
What you need to understand about the fight over same-sex marriage is that it isn’t a fight over same-sex marriage. It’s a fight over the freedom to marry. My freedom and yours. If you have been sitting back watching the religious right take a torch to the marriages of same-sex couples because you didn’t figure it had anything to do with you, I have two words for you: You’re next.
The unemployment numbers are dreadful. But for once, there’s a glimmer of hope on the horizon: conservatives are going Galt.
"While they take to the streets politically, untold numbers of America’s wealth producers are going on strike financially. Dr. Helen Smith, a Tennessee forensic psychologist and political blogger, dubbed the phenomenon "Going Galt" last fall. It’s a reference to the famed Ayn Rand novel "Atlas Shrugged," in which protagonist John Galt leads the entrepreneurial class to cease productive activities in order to starve the government of revenue. (…)
The perpetual Borrow-Spend-Panic-Repeat machine in Washington depends on the capitulation of the wealth producers. There’s only one monkey wrench that can stop the redistributionist thieves’ engine. It’s engraved with the word: Enough."
"Just think what kind of nightmare scenario we might be inflicted with if the titans of finance who’ve made up such a large proportion of high earners in recent years were to pull back on their efforts! I shudder."
Unfortunately, we don’t know how many of America’s wealth producers are going to go on strike, since their number is "untold".
There’s a wee problem here that I’m sure has been spotted by the gasbags on the right. Vis:
But every one of them will free up work for someone else. And thanks to eight years of Bush’s economic policies, we are not short of unemployed people to take up the slack.
I am puzzled by one thing, however: the fact that none of the people who advocate "going Galt" seem to have actually done it.
I appreciate your puzzlement Hilzoy. Keep looking at the sentence you wrote about how every one of them that goes Galt frees up a job for someone else and you get the picture. They know damn well that quitting isn’t going to prove anything, other then how worthless they actually were in the grand economic scheme of things. Let’s face it, these are the folks who have been advocating, for decades now, the kinds of deregulation blue sky that got us into this mess in the first place. Wealth producers? More like wealth leaches.
I’m not clear whether the point of "going Galt" is to stop doing creative or productive work, as Rand’s novel would suggest, or trying to lower one’s income, as many of the people quoted in storiesabout "goingGalt" claim.
To stop doing productive work, you’d have had to have been doing productive work to begin with.
But as best I can tell, the people advocating this are doing neither. Consider:
Rep. John Campbell has neither resigned from Congress nor given back any part of his salary.
Michelle Malkin is still blogging, and still seems to be on the PJMedia payroll.
Dr. Helen, who is "still mulling over ways that she can "go Galt,"" has not taken any of the obvious steps: stopping blogging, giving up her career, severing her connection to PJTV, or even not taking BlogAds. Neither has her husband.
Cassy at Wizbang, who says it’s "time to go Galt", doesn’t seem to have stopped blogging either, and Wizbang is still running ads.
It’s almost enough to make me think they’re just posturing.
Like…when they’re going on about homosexuality and sexual morality? Personal accountability? Let’s face it, if it weren’t for the right wing billionaire dole most of these deep thinkers wouldn’t have an income, let alone a platform. They’re gasbags. And I’ll endure lectures on the evils of government spending and taxation from a lot of people, but not a congressman. Especially not a republican congressman.
Let’s take a closer look at this ersatz grass roots revolt against President Obama’s economic policies…shall we?
Populist revolt against the U.S. government is all the rage in the Republican Party, these days. As they tell the story, the public is so outraged by the recovery and reinvestment efforts of the Obama administration that Americans everywhere are turning out to overthrow the tyrannical king of the federal government by re-enacting the Boston Tea Party.
Funny thing, though: it turns out this whole "populist" movement was a planned PR stunt funded by big-money right-wing backers of the GOP who specialize in faking grassroots movements to drum up opposition to Barack Obama.
Everything about this so called "Tea Party" movement was pre-planned–from the supposedly "spontaneous rant" of CNBC stock market reporter, Rick Santelli, to the presumed ground-level organizing of protests all over the country. Fake, fake, fake–like a product launch staged covertly to look like a spontaneous trend.
Playboy bloggers Mark Ames and Yasha Levine pulled together all the pieces of this puzzle in an incredible expose (Exposing The Rightwing PR Machine):
What hasn’t been reported until now is evidence linking Santelli’s “tea party” rant with some very familiar names in the Republican rightwing machine, from PR operatives who specialize in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns (called “astroturfing”) to bigwig politicians and notorious billionaire funders. As veteran Russia reporters, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it. If it seemed scripted, that’s because it was.
What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.
As you read this, Big Business is pouring tens of millions of dollars into their media machines in order to destroy just about every economic campaign promise Obama has made, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal. At stake isn’t the little guy’s fight against big government, as Santelli and his bot-supporters claim, but rather the “upper 2 percent”’s war to protect their wealth from the Obama Adminstration’s economic plans. When this Santelli “grassroots” campaign is peeled open, what’s revealed is a glimpse of what is ahead and what is bound to be a hallmark of his presidency.
Go read the whole thing. It’s the right-wing billionaire club we’ve all come to know and love, screwing the political process so they can keep screwing the middle-class. If you thought the fight was over when Obama won, you are sadly mistaken.
If we could just get rid of these drooling morons we might have a rational discussion in this country about the economy and how to clean up the mess the billionaire teat sucking jackasses have brought down on all of us. Going Galt would be a blessing for this country…the best thing they’ve ever done for it. So, fat chance of that happening.
Atlas Shrugged…Then Charged It To Someone Else…(continued)
Commentary from John Stamos on This Post regarding the new hippies. Why yes John, I have read Doctor Seuss. Let it be said that Seuss could get his point across in a few pages of a children’s book. Rand on the other hand… Well to paraphrase Mark Twain’s comment on the music of Richard Wagner, Ayn Rand’s novels are better then they read.
Approximately 2% of the American households make more than $250,000 a year and (you may find this hard to believe) a very high percentage of these high-earning go-getting producers spend their days commenting over at Michelle Malkin’s place… when they’re not busy flying their Lear jets up to Nova Scotia to see the total eclipse of the sun.
Scenes from the Go Go Gaults:
I’ve resigned from my job, and I’m selling my rental properties. After this, I’m moving to a rural little town and simplifying everything. I’ll be reading so many more books soon, if that sort of thing is still allowed.
What motivation do we have to make more money? Only to have it confiscated by the Feds. Bad enough CA just increased a variety of taxes, including the income tax. That’s why I’m looking to move to NV. I was just there on Saturday. Won’t be too long now.
I decided I will endeavor to take more business trips and continuing education classes at exotic places and try to reduce taxable income.
Yep, it’s happening. Several friends are shutting down to sustaining levels. Partly due to housing and the rest due to the tax hikes.
I shut down my online businesses in early November, I don’t remember why. I’m now a net user of Obama Cheese. I may even apply for food stamps.
Small businesses will lay off employees, and I hope the first to go are the ones that voted for bho. They wanted ‘hope and change’, well you got it. These bho voters have NO idea how much more taxes they are going to be paying. I just hope those bho voters have their IRA, 401k and stocks cratered as much as those who DID not vote for bho. Such(sic) it up kids!
I’m starting my victory garden this spring. My sister is expanding hers and in exchange for my helping with that I will be able to claim some of the produce. I’ve been couponing for over a year now and have a nice stockpile of food for when things get really, really bad. I can’t believe that my country is on this path. From Ronald Reagan to this Marxist in the span of one generation. Unbelievable.
I have a friend who is planning to not work overtime this year to stay well below the dangerous benchmark that is 250k. His point was that he might as well take some time off and enjoy and relax rather than work and give every dollar above 250 away. I don’t blame his reasoning and the loss is, he spends his money.
You have to wonder if this guy ever paid taxes because here be basically admits he doesn’t understand how the income tax works:
ABC News reports on "upper-income taxpayers" who are trying to reduce their income so they avoid proposed tax increases on those earning more than $250,000.
According to ABC, one attorney "plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law." According to the attorney: "We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00." ABC also quotes a dentist who is trying to figure out how to reduce her income.
This is stunningly wrong.
The ABC article is based on the premise that an individual’s entire income is taxed at the same rate. If that were the case, it would be possible for a family earning $249,999 to have a higher after-tax income than a family earning $255,000, because the family earning $249,999 would pay a lower tax rate.
But that isn’t actually how income tax works.
In reality, a family earning $255,000 will pay the higher tax rate only on its last $5,001 in income; the first $249,999 will continue to be taxed at the old rate. So intentionally lowering your income from $255,000 to $249,999 is counter-productive; it will result in a lower after-tax income.
The people ABC quoted don’t seem to understand that. Worse, ABC doesn’t seem to understand it, either.
Anyway…back to Atlas Slouched, and TBogg’s personal favorite:
We also have “gone Galt”. Hubby decided to retire and start Medicare instead of our original plan of waiting two years.
Well that’s showing those looters a thing or two. Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan has a note from a reader that explains it all for the dense of skull…
Downsized out of my career in my mid-50’s, after 20+ years of faithful service to a 150-year-old company that declared bankruptcy some months after my termination. I got a decent severance – in the latest wave of layoffs, there were people with more years of service who got zilch. I have found some freelance daily-hire work here and there – last year my after-tax/after-insurance net was about 25% of what I had been making. Still looking, still hoping.
The 401(k) that I’d faithfully funded since the mid-80s lost a third of its value in just a few weeks. I had bad vibes about the bankster/gangsters over a year ago (CDO’s and swaps? I’d read about them on internet message boards back in 2006, but gave more credence to my adviser since he’s an expert and the internet is notoriously unreliable. Fat lot of good that did.) I know he wasn’t trying to steer me in a wrong direction – he feels as badly as I do. Thank God BushCo never got their filthy mitts on Social Security.
I’ve always conducted my financial affairs in a conservative fashion, so I have a (dwindling) cushion to rely on and some equity in a home with a (for now) manageable mortgage. I pay for my own health insurance (a lousy policy with high premiums and deductibles – please, dear God – help me stay healthy.) The premiums are about four times more than I spend for food, all of which is prepared at home by me. I haven’t been more than 15 miles from home in more than a year. When cabin fever sets in, I go for a walk.
I’m not complaining, really I’m not. I am able to stay warm and dry and fed, and current on my bills. I am fortunate – I know I am blessed. I don’t take it for granted and don’t consider myself more worthy than others who find themselves in far more dire straits. I could very well be in their shoes before this is all over.
This is exactly what woke me up from my libertarian delusion back during the big Reagan recession: seeing so many decent, hard working people who did everything the way they were supposed to get clobbered because the gods of finance and industry turned out to be fallible human beings too, and not Greek gods holding the world on their shoulders. I was working as an architectural model maker back then, and watched appalled as developers and their financiers ran themselves off a cliff, knowing full well they were heading for the edge, knowing full well they were going to fall off eventually, knowing full well it would be a financial disaster, but utterly unable to stop themselves from chasing those last few dollars off that cliff. When it was over, nearly all my clients, the businesses I sold my services to as a model maker, had gone belly up and I was mowing lawns to make ends meet. But at least I didn’t have any mouths to feed.
When the brakes came off the savings and loans, the crooks moved right in and without oversight, there was nothing to stop them. And even had they all been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, the damage was done. There’s the problem. I saw families who had once owned nice homes, whose parents worked hard, made good money, saved responsibly and lived within their means, living in tents in campgrounds because everything they had vanished in the savings and loan scandals. What good would prosecuting the savings and loan crooks have done for them? Their money is gone.
That was the end of my libertarian years. I saw that greed is not good after all. I saw that wealth is not an indicator of either moral, or common sense. I saw that to err is human, but to really screw things up you need a lot of money. I saw that selfishness is not a virtue. Pride is a virtue. Ambition is a virtue. Selfishness is a cancer on your soul. It turns your neighbors in this life, and all their hopes, all their dreams, everything they ever made for themselves, their families, their kids, into play money.
There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer. -Ansel Adams
I am a graphic artist. That is to say, I express via imagery. I don’t perform on stage. I don’t write. I am not a composer of music. I paint. I draw. But mostly I take one of my cameras and go for these little strolls around my world. I am a photographer. Not a professional nor a recognized artist, but a serious amateur. I have some galleries up here on the web site you can peruse if you like. They’re typical of what I do. Photography as been a passion of mine ever since I was in grade school. I think I can say after all these years of doing it, that I have a distinctive voice.
I don’t like a lot of what I produce. That is to say, I would rather be producing something a tad more cheerful, or sensuous maybe, or beautiful. But I have this urge to produce a lot of this…
…and…this…
…and…this…
…that I can’t turn away from. I have to make these images. It’s what I do. I take a camera, decide if I’m in a color or black and white frame of mind just then, and go for a wander. Sooner or later something I’ve never been able to put words to tugs me over to something, and then I am exploring a subject. Snap…circle it a bit…snap…circle some more…snap…snap…snap… It’s what I do when I get a camera in my hands. Oh yes…sometimes I get a chance to do a little of this…
I love this one…but even this, if you look at it carefully, has a sense of the other stuff in it just below the surface.
For almost a decade I gave up taking photographs because I couldn’t stand to look at what was coming out of me anymore. This is hard for some folks of a…shall we say…religious right persuasion…to get about the artsy tofu and brie types they just love to loath…let alone liberals in general. It isn’t so much If it feels good do it, as You do what you must. As a matter of fact yes, it is entirely possible to be consumed with a subject matter you don’t much like, and still feel absolutely compelled to approach it with fierce honesty. But honesty is even less welcome then art in the mega-mall cathedrals of the heartland.
My first preview of at photographer Jona Frank’s book of portraits about Patrick Henry College occurred through Mother Jones, where it appeared alongside image galleries on phone sex operators, Aryan outfitters, and women in Afghanistan. (Mother Jones’ photo galleries reflect a wide variety of topics, but I’m mentioning the ones it promoted alongside the photos from Frank’s second book, Right: Portraits from the Evangelical Ivy League.)
The students of Patrick Henry College, the nation’s first residential college designed for young people who grew up as homeschoolers, looked awfully stiff and serious. I asked Ed Veith, a professor of literature and provost of the college, for his thoughts. Veith sent along a memo that he wrote to Patrick Henry students when he saw the book:
I was greatly angered when I saw the book Right: Portraits from the Evangelical Ivy League by the photographer Jona Frank. The book features pictures of many of you — portrayed in the [worst] way possible — with an accompanying text that plays to all the leftwing stereotypes about Christians and conservatives. The dishonesty of the artist is staggering: she posed you in stiff and awkward positions and told you not to smile; then she caricatured you as stiff, awkward, and without a sense of humor. In reality, I know that you PHC students are lively and interesting, with vibrant and highly-individualistic personalities. I think that Ms. Frank, who hung around campus for months and who even visited some of your families, betrayed your trust, violated your privacy, and distorted your identity.
Since writing to Veith, I’ve found another collection of Frank’s PHC images at Newsweek. That collection includes a narration by Frank, in which she speaks with clear affection for these students. Newsweek’s gallery is well worth a visit, as Frank’s narration is so warm and engaging.
If the photographer was any good…and Frank’s photos can put you in mind of another Frank in their straightforwardness…then her images are honest representations of what she saw, what she found when she went to Patrick Henry. But you have to understand what Adams is saying in that quote I put at the top of this post. The photographer is always present in every image. But so are you, the viewer. Frank didn’t set out to preach and not seeing the sermon he expected out of her, Veith got angry. But not every negative review, is a bad review.
[Update…] So I bought a copy of Frank’s photo book. It’s good…but I wouldn’t put her in the same class as Robert Frank. Most of the photos are posed. Few are the kind of beautiful human moments frozen out of time shots that Frank did so astonishingly well. But Robert Frank casts a large shadow over all of us. He’s one of Photography’s perfect masters. Jona Frank’s work here is good, she works well with her subjects and all her photographs are taken in their environment. You get the sense of how they fit together, how the people and their environment are each expressions of the other. But she is not a beachcomber searching for the stray seashell, the random pebble that tells stories of the open sea. She does environmental portraiture and she’s good at it. Robert Frank did moments in time. Different stuff.
Jim Burroway makes a good catch I’d missed when looking at the new anti-gay ad campaign created by Campaign Secrets…the one that shows an unseen gay sniper putting a family and more specifically their little children in the crosshairs. This one is good…it really says it all…
By the way, we also learn that public schools no longer celebrate Father’s Day. Wait a minute. That couldn’t be because it’s celebrated on the third Sunday in June while school’s out, could it? Naah, it’s a much better story when it’s all the gays’ fault.
Dig it. Never mind that Father’s Day happens after the school year ends…just remember that the homosexuals have forced schools to stop celebrating Father’s Day.
Now…this kind of crap may actually fool a lot of people, not all of whom necessarily want someone to feed them pre-fabricated lies about gays they can pass around without taking responsibility for it. Some people will actually hear this and think…Wow…the gays took Father’s Day out of the schools… But you know goddamned well the people who made that ad knew that it was horseshit, and almost certainly so did the folks who bought it. And it’s a safe bet that its target audience doesn’t care if it’s truthful or not.
There’s your moral crusade right there. There’s your righteousness.
The Fine Art Of Inflaming Violent Passions Toward Homosexuals
Via Pam’s House Blend…and as of now racing across the net like a fire. West Virginia Christianists are gearing up for a push to enact an anti same-sex marriage amendment in their state. As always, it isn’t enough to simply make a case for heterosexual supremacy. They have to demonize gay people too. Their latest ad starts out with the image of a gay sniper putting a heterosexual family, and more specifically their little children, in the cross hairs. They are being targeted, to be gunned down, by some the homosexuals. Here’s a screen shot:
Bear in mind that this ad is running in a state that’s maybe only a tad less armed to the teeth then Texas. And the message of this particular sequence is crystal clear: The homosexuals are going to kill your family, starting with your children. Of course they’ll insist its only a metaphor. They don’t mean that homosexuals are Literally going to kill your family. Naturally all the West Virginians who see this ad will understand that.
This is what gets gay people killed in this country every year. And make no mistake, the people creating and the people running these ads are well aware of that fact. But we are not so much human beings as cockroaches to them. They want us gone. They want us eliminated. If the state won’t do what Leviticus commands, then maybe Bubba will…
The video is below. The sniper shot comes in at about .53 seconds. Then it’s another four minutes plus warning everyone about the threat the homosexuals pose to families and children. In 1977 Jerry Falwell stood beside Anita Bryant, who was then fighting to have Dade County’s anti-discrimination ordinance repealed by popular vote, and told a room full of reporters that “A homosexual will kill you as soon as look at you.” Now they are, almost literally, telling people in West Virginia that we do in fact intend to kill them, and kill their children. Gay people are going to die because of this ad.
Pam over at the Blend notes this same group who made the ad…Campaign Secrets…also created an attack ad against the AARP back in 2005. AARP’s crime back then was opposing Bush’s plan to let the stock market play with your social security pension money. To discredit AARP, Campaign Secrets cooked up this little gem:
Dig it. The AARP is wrong about social security, because it hates our men in uniform and loves faggots. That, literally, was the message.
California, the eighth largest economy in the world, is broke.
"People are going to be hurt starting today," said Hallye Jordan, speaking on behalf of the state Controller. "There’s no money."
Since state legislators failed to meet an end of January deadline on an agreement to make up for California’s $40 billion budget gap, residents won’t be getting their state tax rebates, scholarships to Cal Grant college will go unpaid, vendors invoices will remain uncollected and county social services will cease.
It takes a two-thirds majority in both legislative houses for future increases in all state tax rates or amounts of revenue collected, including income tax rates. It also requires two-thirds vote majority in local elections for local governments wishing to raise special taxes. What that means in practice, is a small minority of anti-government republicans can veto all tax increases, but not any spending bills.
This was deliberate. Knowing that the voters would never accept lower taxes if it meant reduced services, the ideologues decided to sell the voters on the free lunch theory of government…that taxes were high because government was inherently wasteful and corrupt, not because the public wanted it to do things above and beyond the basic services of police, courts, armed forces, like…fight fires…build roads…keep the water supply drinkable…prevent mass outbreaks of food poisoning…provide for the needy…put the unemployed back to work…and so on. Right wing anti-Government operatives like Howard Jarvis and Grover Norquist knew exactly what they were doing. The idea Was to bankrupt government, as a back door way of killing the New Deal. As Grover Norquist put it, to starve government "down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub."
Well…here we are. In right wing Nirvana…
"Some 46 states face budget shortfalls, forcing them to slash funding for many services," reported CNN. "But California, the largest state in the union by population, faces a deficit that totals more than 35% of its general fund."
Nice work Mr. Norquist, Mr. Jarvis. The whirlwind you ordered is in the mail. And all those people you sold free lunch government to won’t be very happy with you when they’re watching their homes being auctioned off, and their children going hungry, so that your fat cat bankrollers could buy a few more yachts and luxury condos…
Just a glimpse into the far-right psyche. The two biggest ticket items that have leaped into public consciousness discrediting parts of the stimulus package have been family planning and STD prevention. Both have been blaring Drudge headlines. Now, this is technical stuff and I don’t doubt that there’s merit to the case against portraying these as in some way necessary counter-cyclical emergency funding.
But why is it the GOP is so easily galvanized by sexual panic? Weird, if you ask me. This is the budget we’re talking about here. Even there, they reach, like the exhausted tacticians they are, for the culture war. And it isn’t reaching back.
The republicans became the party of culture war when they gave the nomination to Nixon. This is what people continue not to get about them…even now, amidst the horrific train wreckage of the "free market economy" republican domination of the federal government was supposed to usher in. Oh…they betrayed their principles, did you say? No. Absolutely no. They did nothing of the kind. All that small government free market stuff was just the window dressing, over a core that was entirely, completely, absolutely about culture war. When they finally got the power they craved, they set to work implementing their vision. Yes, it is an unmitigated disaster. But you have to understand that it was always going to be that.
They didn’t care about the economy…they cared about elbowing science out of the classroom and out of government in favor of their nutty religion in which Jesus says to hate the stranger, obey the authorities, and that the rich will inherent the earth. They didn’t care about the deficit…they cared about keeping women, people of color and homosexuals in their place. They didn’t care about national security…they cared about rolling back decades of constitutional law that said all Americans were entitled to equal justice, equal rights, to life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness. They didn’t care about fighting terrorism…they cared about fighting the 60s all over again, and winning this time.
In Goldwater they had their last honest small government candidate. Nixon gave them culture war, which they embraced with gusto. Why? The darkies weren’t drinking from the fountain marked ‘coloreds’ anymore. The kids weren’t passively going off to die in a war nobody understood, and what was worse, they weren’t cutting their hair. And more horrifying then all of that, the women were going off the Miltown pill and going on the birth control one instead and asserting their sexual equality. Suddenly you couldn’t make jokes about women drivers anymore. And then the faggots started marching.
Something had to be done. Nixon was the one. That he turned out to be a crook, should have been a warning. But the first thing you have to understand about culture warriors, is they have no inner sense of morality, of right and wrong. That is why they fight tooth and nail to keep their world from changing around them. They have no brakes, so they need fences and guardrails. That, and the privilege that comes with being on top of the cultural ladder, even if you’re at the bottom of the economic one. White. Male. Protestant. Heterosexual. You got it made pal…drink up. In a world where people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, or the shape of their own genitals or that of their lovers’, then what becomes of the privileged?
The joke after the last Republican convention was that you didn’t see any black or brown faces in the crowd until it was all over, and the cleaning crews came out. So what about all that Big Tent talk? What about all that reaching out to minorities and stuff? For real? Why…the same Goddamned thing that happened to all that small government stuff. It wasn’t important. It wasn’t what the party is about. The party is about the culture war. Of course the first thing they had fits about in the stimulus plan was the family planning items. Do you still think, after the last eight years of it, that they even saw the rest of it? I sure hope you don’t think that since Bush went down in flames they went down with him. They sure didn’t go down with Nixon.
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